Wow. Three days away from writing this little blog and it’s like all the words in my brain decided, “If you’re not going to use us, we’re just going to head out.” Luckily, I think they were all only gathering at the door when I returned, and I might be able to convince them to come back inside. We’ll see. The three days away involved the first birthday and Mother’s Day since the death of my wife last August. Mostly, I turtled up and sat at home except for two forays to hear live music on Friday and Saturday. Those were nice analgesics.

Naturally, I thought about the past a lot. And I had a good conversation with a close friend of many, many years, Jerry Jones. At lot of things came up, but in particular we talked about the past. We talked about how people have a past even when they come to a marriage, and it doesn’t disappear it stays there even as they go on to create a new past, by spending a life together, and he said, in a great flash of wisdom, “That past is part of the collective story and you can’t deny the collective story. You can’t change it, improve it, or modify it. It’s just there to haunt and delight us at the same time.”

I thought those were some good words to abide as I turn to the future and try to imagine a life without my wife, haunted and delighted at the same time, by our collective story. This is when it would be really helpful if I were novelist, I might make up something good. But I’m an essayist, so, I’ll recount that I went for a walk in the yard. The Carolina Buckthorn is blooming which will lead to nice red berries, and in another part of the yard the golden leadball has joined the party, with its gorgeous yellow flowers. It just goes to show, I think, that life goes on, and beauty is not a thing to possess but something to hold in the heart after it reveals itself to you.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale